Goals As Beacons

Goals As Beacons

There’s an old saying that goes something like, “If you don’t have a goal in mind, someone else will set one for you.” It’s true. How many times have you bought something that you rarely used? How many relationships have you entered that, when you thought back on it, weren’t what you wanted? How many times have you wondered how you ended up where you are?

A lot of this can be explained by not having goals set and/or not referring back to them.

How It Works

When you don’t have a goal set in a particular area, you’re much more vulnerable to outside influence. A lot of advertising depends on this. Let’s face it–you can make just about anything sound like it’s the coolest thing in the planet.

It reminds me of a friend of mine who has a lot of knickknacks around his place. Whenever he’s in a store and he sees something he likes, he mentally imagines it somewhere on a shelf or table in his home, he mentally checks his bank account balance, and if there’s enough in the bank, he buys it.

What’s missing? Checking with his larger goals! While having a cool looking place may be a goal he’s meeting, what about his other goals? In particular, what abuot his financial goals?

How It Can Work

What if my friend set some financial goals? What if he wanted to create a secure financial future and saw a certain dollar amount in savings would do that for him? And what if he knew how that broke (pardon the pun) down in terms of what he would need to do each year to accomplish that?

In that case, he could see the cool thing in the store and ask himself, “How does buying this fit in with my financial goals?” My guess is, it wouldn’t. The goal could act as a beacon in his decision making.

Feeding Your Unconscious

If this sounds tedious and not really fun, it doesn’t have to be. When you feed your unconscious mind good instructions, it does most of this filtering for you. You don’t even have to think about it. Then you simply automatically get excited and motivated when things that will help you get your goals appear. And decisions happen easily because you’ve got a built-in beacon for your decision-making.

But How?

Affirmations are good. Self-hypnosis is good. The New Behavior Generator is good. Setting Goals With NLP is good. Even just thinking about what it is you want in the major areas of your life and writing it down can be really effective! I’d suggest these categories at a minimum…